


Vintage (Bittersweet)

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Bubble Bath, Drinking, Drinking & Talking, F/M, Light Angst, Past Relationship(s), The X-Files Revival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 13:50:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10832577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: Scully always calls Mulder when she's had a glass of wine.





	Vintage (Bittersweet)

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: XF revival  
> A/N: You're welcome, Tumblr.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

She should have stopped after two glasses of wine. Hell, she should have stopped after one. But she decided to try to socialize with her coworkers, and she’d forgotten how unbearable other doctors can be. Especially the men. Twenty years of experience and they still talk over her. Twenty years of being among the world’s top specialists in cryptobiology and cryptoepidemiology, more papers published than she can remember, more classified information stuffed into her brain than she could forget in six lifetimes, and she’s still treated like a pretty little lady. It infuriates her. She nearly texts Mulder -at least his condescension was never based on her gender presentation - but she stops herself at the last minute and orders another glass of wine.

“Blah blah blah,” says Smug Doctor One, and Smug Doctor Two chuckles in a genial manner. It’s so Boys’ Club that she wants to throw up. Instead she grits her teeth and smiles.

“Doctor Scully,” says Smug One, “are you enjoying yourself?”

“Of course,” she says smoothly. 

“I’m sure you’re glad to be out of the FBI,” says Smug Two. 

“The hours are better,” she says, sipping at her third glass of wine, wishing the nurses had come too. The nurses she can talk to. The nurses treat her like a person.

“Is that all?” says Smug Two. “Didn’t you work mostly in the morgue? Surely the company’s better.” He smiles to himself, sure of her answer.

“On occasion,” she says, and takes another swallow of wine. It’s a dry white and it bites at the inside of her cheeks. She relishes the tart finish. It’s like the aftertaste of all the things she wants to say. She would rather deal with dead people than these entitled men with their minimal hours and large paychecks. They complain about being busy if they see three or four patients per day. That isn’t the workload she’s used to. She misses her fourteen-hour days, the multiple autopsies, the paperwork in triplicate. At least the FBI didn’t encourage her to bill the maximum for her services. She was contributing to a greater cause than a hospital’s coffers. 

Smug One and Smug Two look at each other for a moment and decide to laugh. She chuckles too. At them, not with them. She calls up the Uber app on her phone and drains her glass.

“Gentlemen,” she says, nodding, and they nod back. She’s given them an out, a way to save their egos. She knows they’ll discuss her rudeness when she’s gone, but she doesn’t care. She didn’t go to med school for the social occasions. She went because she wanted to save lives and change the world. She rarely gets to do that anymore.

If the house weren’t so far away, she’d ask the Uber driver to take her to Mulder. As it is, she goes back to her apartment and runs a bath, her brain as full of froth as the tub is. She sinks into the warm water and lets her body relax. Another day, she thinks, another minute difference made in the world. She cannot be a part of something without changing it - Heisenberg’s principle proves that. She is making her mark, as invisible as it is. In the aggregate, she will have mattered. That’s what she wants.

If her phone weren’t out of reach, she’d call Mulder. Instead, she reviews casefiles in her head, goes over the mnemonics she learned so long ago: nerve insertions, the bones of the skull, the tidy ways the muscles knit together. She lets herself drift, part of the world but apart from it, insulated by the bubbles of her bath. 

She reaches for her phone before she even realizes it. She’s still staring at the screen when she realizes she’s called Mulder.

He picks up on the third ring. “Mulder.”

“You know it’s me,” she says.

“Habit,” he tells her.

They let the silence pool between them for a moment. She’s leaning over the side of the tub, floating somewhere between regret and desire.

“Did you need something?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“How about that local sports team?” he jokes, but his voice is a little flat.

“Mulder,” she says, and he quiets. “We never really talk.”

“No,” he says after a moment.

“Eddie Van Blundht told me that, years ago,” she says. “And we still don’t talk.”

“Scully…” he begins, and trails off. “What is there to say?”

“Everything,” she says. “Novels, Mulder. Epics. We never stopped talking, before.”

“Apparently we never said what we needed to say,” he says, a tinge of bitterness in his voice that bites at her the way the wine did.

“You know we didn’t,” she chides.

“I know,” he says.

They breathe for a moment, each of them at their separate ends of the line.

“What are you wearing?” he says finally, some sort of homage to the ease they used to find in each other.

“Nothing,” she says. “I’m taking a bubble bath.”

He laughs, one genuine chuckle, and she knows she’s surprised him. “You’ve gone Hollywood.”

“I knew you were in the bath,” she says. “I could hear you sloshing.”

“You only need one hand to hold the phone,” he tells her, and they both understand what he was doing with the other, all those years ago, at the tentative and tender beginning of their intimacy.

“Mulder,” she says, and the wine puts words in her mouth that she didn’t intend but doesn’t regret as she says them. “Why did we hide from each other?”

“The world was strange,” he says. “It felt dangerous.”

“It’s not any less strange now,” she says. “Maybe it won’t ever be.”

“Maybe it never was,” he says. “Maybe we handled it better then.”

“They say wisdom comes with age,” she muses.

“Maybe our wisdom was that we couldn’t sustain the effort,” he says.

“I would think that you’d be the one to imagine a world in which a happy ending was possible,” she says.

“You’re the one who grew up in a happy household,” he reminds her.

“What would it have taken?” she asks. “For us to be happy.”

“If I’d known,” he says, “I wouldn’t have to ask what you’re wearing.”

“My coworkers are jerks,” she says after a long pause.

“More than your coworker at the Bureau?” he asks, laughter in his voice.

“Astonishingly, yes,” she says.

“It’s a universe of infinite possibilities,” he says. “You can always call me if you need backup.”

“Always?” she asks.

“I made a promise,” he tells her. “That hasn’t changed.”

“Mulder,” she says, but there aren’t any other words to follow it, or there are too many words, but either way she can’t come up with anything more eloquent than his name, a shorthand for all she can’t say. Two decades of habit don’t break under the strain of three glasses of wine and a hot bath. 

“I’ll talk to you later,” he says eventually. 

“Okay,” she says, and hangs up.

She lets the phone fall onto her towel and sinks back into the water, submerging herself until all she can hear is the ripple of her pulse, the roar of the water in her ears, masking the echoes of what might have been.


End file.
